In recent years, a Thin Film Transistor Liquid Crystal Display (hereinafter TFT-LCD) has become a display technology across various sizes due to its numerous advantages, and its applications can be found in various fields, e.g., a television, a notebook computer, a monitor, a mobile phone, etc.
The TFT-LCD includes a Thin Film Transistor (hereinafter TFT) substrate and a Color Filter (hereinafter CF) substrate, and a liquid crystal layer interposed between these two substrates. Moreover, the TFT-LCD is divided into a display area and a non-display area, where the non-display area surrounds the display area, and a sealing material is arranged in the non-display area to seal the liquid crystal layer between the TFT substrate and the CF substrate.
In the prior art, there is a cell fabrication process in a flow of assembling the TFT substrate and the CF substrate, where the liquid crystal layer is dropped in advance onto the CF substrate, and the sealing material is coated in the non-display area of the CF substrate, then the TFT substrate and the CF substrate are bonded together, and finally the sealing material is cured to form a liquid crystal cell. Generally, when the TFT substrate and the CF substrate are assembled in an ODF (One Drop Filling) method, the sealing material is cured through ultraviolet (UV) for rapid curing, that is, it is cured by being illuminated with UV. With the UV-cured sealing material, the UV-cured sealing material has the feature of being instantly cured, so contamination arising when the sealing material before being cured contacts with the liquid crystal layer can be controlled to the minimum extent. After the sealing material is cured by UV illumination, the UV-cured sealing material is heated to be further cured for further enhanced adhesion.
Referring to FIG. 1, FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram of a UV curing process on a sealing material of a TFT-LCD in the prior art. As illustrated in FIG. 1, the TFT-LCD includes a CF substrate 102 and a TFT substrate 103; and a sealing material 101 is arranged between the CF substrate 102 and the TFT substrate 103 in a non-display area of the TFT-LCD, a black matrix (simply BM below) 104 is arranged on the inside of the CF substrate 102, and the sealing material 101 is arranged between the BM 104 and the TFT substrate 103.
Since the BM 104 is arranged on the inside of the CF substrate 102 and the BM 104 is a black light-shielding material through which no light can be transmitted, thus the sealing material 101 can only be illuminated with UV 106 from the side of the TFT substrate 103 for UV curing. As illustrated in FIG. 1, since a plurality of metal wires 105 are further arranged on the inside of the TFT substrate 103, the UV 106 can only illuminate in the region without metal wires 105.
If the process of UV curing is not well done, then ions in the sealing material 101 may contaminate liquid crystal layer and other problems of the TFT-LCD will occur, so UV curing process is greatly important for the process of fabricating the TFT-LCD. In order to enable UV 106 to cure the sealing material 101 sufficiently, typically a transmissivity over the TFT substrate 103 in the non-display area is required to be above 50%, that is, the region without metal wires 105 exceeds 50%.
The TFT-LCD further includes a gate driver and a data driver. The driver circuit is costly to produce and can be made in the technology of Amorphous Silicon Gate (ASG) driver in which the TFT-LCD is manufactured by patterning and integrating the gate driver circuit, gate lines and data lines together with thin film transistors on a panel of the TFT-LCD. Since the ASG technology can dispense with a plug-in gate driver circuit on the original panel, it can improve the integration level of the TFT-LCD, reduce the number of external elements and lower a manufacturing cost and thus has been widely applied to the TFT-LCD.
FIG. 2 is a schematic diagram of a TFT substrate with ASGs.
As illustrated in FIG. 2, the TFT substrate includes a display area and a non-display area, and a plurality of gate lines 202 and a plurality of data lines 203 are arranged on the TFT substrate, where the plurality of gate lines 202 and the plurality of data lines 203 intersect with each other to define a plurality of pixel elements located in the display area of the TFT substrate, the plurality of data lines 203 are connected respectively to a data driver 204, and the data driver 204 provides the data lines 203 with a data drive signal sequentially, and the data driver 204 is connected to a printed circuit board 205.
An ASG element 201 is arranged in the non-display area of the TFT substrate, and the ASG element 201 can provide a row of pixel elements connected therewith with a gate drive signal separately. The ASG element 201 is also connected to the printed circuit board 205.
With the ASG technology, since devices in the ASGs occupy a large area, transmissivity of the TFT substrate in the non-display area is greatly lowered, i.e., transmissivity of UV is lowered, so that the sealing material may not be cured sufficiently, and contaminants may be mixed into adjacent liquid crystal layer. Thus, it is desirable to design a liquid crystal panel with a panel space utilized effectively so as to have the sealing material cured sufficiently.